Radio Memories Vol. 5

Since this is Volume 5 of this blog, so I’ll remind you that my memory is not perfect. That was ingrained in me when I undertook a podcast series for the SC Broadcasters Association and a group of retired broadcasters called the SLOBs, Slightly Legendary Old Broadcasters. It was not uncommon for two presenters in a podcast to have slightly divergent memories of the details of an event up to 60 years ago. So, stipulating that the same caveat applies to me, here goes, hope you enjoy…

In the fall of 1965, I sat for and passed my FCC Third Class Radiotelephone license, so I took an aircheck tape of one of my “Dawn Patrol” shows to Woody Windham, the program director, and afternoon drive DJ at WCOS. At the time the station was located on the second floor of the Cornell Arms Apartment Building on the corner of Sumter and Pendleton Streets, just off the campus of the University of South Carolina. More importantly to me, it was just three short blocks from my dormitory at the Honeycomb Towers. Woody accepted my tape and told me he would get back to me after he listened to it. I was hoping to get a foot in the door because one of our other DJs, Rick Amme had been hired part-time by Woody the previous year.

They say that timing is everything and it sure proved true for me. That year, Bob Fulton, who would later become the “Voice of the Gamecocks” was doing play-by-play announcing for the Georgia Tech Bulldogs football team. Because Bob was also the Morning Drive DJ on WCOS, the FM station was carrying Bob’s football broadcasts. Woody needed a “board operator” for the games on Saturday afternoon. Woody offered me the job. I jumped at it. It wasn’t doing Top 40 radio, but it was a paying job in radio. In case you are wondering what a “board operator” does, he or she is responsible for getting the broadcast from the telephone line to the transmitter; making sure that all the audio levels were correct and that the commercials and station identifications all went on the air correctly. Wow, the station identifications were all live, which meant that my voice would be what the audience heard when I said “You are listening to Georgia Tech Football on WCOS-FM, Columbia, SC”. 

This led to a rather embarrassing moment on WUSC. One sleepy morning, I keyed the microphone open on WUSC and proudly announced to the audience that they were listening to The Dawn Patrol on WCOS-FM, Columbia! I was pretty shaken up when I realized what I had done and was wondering what the FCC fine was for misidentifying a radio station. If it was more than $5, I couldn’t afford it. Fortunately for me, nothing came from my faux pas. I have also learned that nearly every DJ has done that at one point in their career. 

Disk Jockeys, especially part-time DJs at the time led a rather nomadic life; moving from station to station if not market to market. These were the days before formal contracting of on-air personalities and non-compete clauses were common, so it often happened that a disk jockey would hop over to the competition or to a neighboring city. Add to that the requirement for a live person in the control room operating the station, instead of the more common automation systems used today; it took a lot of DJs to run a station, especially 7/24 which WCOS AM was at the time. 

In late October of 1965, Woody called me up to the station and told me that the DJ who was doing the Sunday evening 7 PM – 1 AM shift was leaving and asked me if I was interested in that slot. The first 2 hours of that shift were playing back reel-to-reel recordings of pre-recorded shoes of traditional New Orleans and Chicago Jazz hosted by George H. Buck the station owner. But, the 9 PM – 1 AM part of that shift was a rock and roll record show! Boom! I was gonna rock the radio dial and get paid for it too. The best part of the deal was that I was doing Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings at WUSC and that my first class on Mondays wasn’t until 10 AM.  I can do this! 

The equipment in Master Control at WCOS was both older and newer than WUSC. WCOS had an old Western Electric 25 B audio board and a pair of RCA turntables that looked like they came from the 1950s. But they also had three Collins Cartridge Tape players, which meant that I didn’t have to cue up the commercials on reel-to-reel tape as I did at WUSC. Win! Another win was that they had a Pepper-Tanner Jingle package! I was delighted to find that even though there were reel-to-reel tapes played on one of the four Magnavox machines. They were commonly called “Maggies” which had a rewind speed that approached the supersonic.  

WCOS also had a strange device called a Gates 101 “Spotmaster.” This crazy machine contained a roll of magnetic tape 18 inches wide and nearly 700 inches long. It looked like a roll of paper towels in the middle of a bunch of tubes, gears, and rollers. The operator could move the magnetic head back and forth to any of the 101 indented positions on the front of the machine and playback the desired track up to 90 seconds long. It sensed the beginning and end of the tape with electric lamps, photocells, and a clear gap near each end of the tape. It was a monster but it worked great. 

The FM station was automated except for Sunday evenings from 9 PM until Midnight when it was a live classical music show hosted by the same DJ who was doing the rock and roll show on the AM station! This was accomplished by playing classical albums on a consumer-grade turntable in the back of Master Control through the “B” channel of the same Western Electric 25-B audio console that the “A” channel was being used for the Top 40 show.  Each input on that 25-B had two toggle switches; the one on the left selected the input and the one on the right selected the channel. When the microphone was turned on, there was sometimes a millisecond delay in the monitor muting circuit that sometimes caused a short feedback “chirm” on the air. The DJs compensated for this by simultaneously pushing the input selector key down and the channel selector up to the “A” channel. The DJs had a habit of switching the channel selector to the “B” Channel to cough or clear our throats. Yes, I did that once or twice in the middle of a Brahms or Beethoven selection on the FM. I even absentmindedly screamed “Rock and Roll Baby!” in the middle of a classical song on the FM. That warranted a call from George Buck, the station owner, who told me that he was glad I was having a good time but to restrict the celebration to the AM station. 

In December of 1965, April Black who was the overnight jock on WCOS, decided to leave radio. Woody again called on me to offer me a full-time position and the overnight shift from 1 AM to 7 AM. It couldn’t happen at a better time as I was having some difficulty with my classes that semester. Organic Chemistry was the “weed out” course for chemistry majors. Despite having an A+ in labs, I busted that class and I also busted my German class which cost me the Naval ROTC Scholarship I had at the University. So I switched from a full-time to a part-time student in January 1966 and from a part-time to a full-time DJ at WCOS.  I continued to do my Dawn Patrol shows on WUSC, honing my DJ skills on both stations. 

I mentioned before that I was initially hired to board operate the Georgia Tech football games where Bob Fulton, our morning DJ was doing play-by-play. Bob’s morning show began at 6 AM but he rarely made his appearance in the studio before the 6:40 sports report. Bob also did not operate his own board so my last hour was split between doing the first 40 minutes of his show and then operating the board until 7 AM when the midday DJ, Scotty Quick came in to run the board until his show started at 10 AM. 

I learned a lot from Bob during our crossover time every morning. Every announcer has his or her “bugaboo” word, one that they could not pronounce correctly no matter how hard they tried. Mine was “regularly.” Unfortunately, my portion of the morning show contained a live commercial. Live commercials were announced from a copybook by the DJ on the air. My live commercial was for a bank that was pushing for their customers to deposit into their savings accounts regularly. After hearing me struggle with the word a few times on his way into the studio, he finally took me aside and suggested that I break the word down; instead of saying “regularly,” say “regular-ly!”  Genius! I now OWNED that word, and all similar words, I.E. Arnold Palmer, that I came across in my radio journey. 

Towards the end of that semester, the other WUSC DJs doing the “Dawn Patrol” were preparing for final exams and then being away for the summer. There was no way I could do overnights on WCOS and then an hour later two more hours on WUSC six days a week and still go to classes part-time. So I reluctantly decided to put my college education on hold and leave WUSC. That was the end of WUSC’s first experiment with rock and roll. Little did I know that I would be back at WUSC, now an FM station 3 decades later as an alumni DJ in the 1990s.